Is it dumb to say “stupidest”?

Sherry over at Everything Language and Grammar had a post way back in May about some athlete who committed a venial grammar sin. Specifically, the athlete said that he had made “the stupidest mistake.” (Having made a number of gallingly stupid mistakes in my life, I can only imagine the depth of idiocy to which the stupidest mistake would descend.) Sherry claims that the athlete has made a further mistake by describing the mistake as stupidest rather than most stupid.

However, there’s no reason to suspect that stupidest is any less proper of a formation than most stupid. Personally, I prefer the former. I did a Google Books search (full view only, so as to eliminate the modern journals that were sneaking into the results) comparing use of the two possibilities before 1900 (at which point the presumed stupiding of the language may have been underway). 463 for most stupid, 407 for stupidest. Similarly, 820 for more stupid, 674 for stupider. So if stupidest has ceased to be a word, it must have done so some time in the last century. And that seems unlikely, given the number of modern people who have no problem with the word.

About The Blog

A lot of people make claims about what "good English" is. Much of what they say is flim-flam, and this blog aims to set the record straight. Its goal is to explain the motivations behind the real grammar of English and to debunk ill-founded claims about what is grammatical and what isn't. Somehow, this was enough to garner a favorable mention in the Wall Street Journal.

About Me

I'm Gabe Doyle, currently a postdoctoral scholar in the Language and Cognition Lab at Stanford University. Before that, I got a doctorate in linguistics from UC San Diego and a bachelor's in math from Princeton.

In my research, I look at how humans manage one of their greatest learning achievements: the acquisition of language. I build computational models of how people can learn language with cognitively-general processes and as few presuppositions as possible. Currently, I'm working on models for acquiring phonology and other constraint-based aspects of cognition.

I also examine how we can use large electronic resources, such as Twitter, to learn about how we speak to each other. Some of my recent work uses Twitter to map dialect regions in the United States.

But “Stupid” fits the paradigm of adjectives that take -est perfectly: bisyllabic with stress on the first syllable and not derived from a participle. Why on earth would someone object to it? Is it because it ends with a consonant? Others do, though, granted, some of them are spelled with a vowel, such as “little”; but “clever” certainly is “cleverer”.

I suppose some people really do think things fall out so neatly: 1 syllable – er; 2 ending in a vowel – er; everything else – most. But then they complain about “funner” and accept “unhappier” …

@Johnathan: Adherence to predetermined rules and structure.
@The Ridger: I haven’t heard of your guidelines for the -est/-er endings, but in every example I can think of involving the -id ending, most/more is proper. E.g., most lucid, more rancid, most candid.
@Billy D: Nobody’s going to arrest you for using “stupidest”. The debate is: should we view “stupidest” as grammatically correct, though it technically isn’t, because it has become extremely popular? Such things have happened before, but in my opinion they only make the already convoluted English language even harder to master.

FYI Billy…you’re arguing about people arguing over the use of a word. That’s probably more “loser”-ish than arguing over the word itself. Just sayin’.